Should I get tired out consistently while just doing generic crafting and cooking? Nor even moving?

So, since I last played this is a new thing it seems. Either that or I must have just bot quite reached the threshold for this to pop up.

I was looting a nearby town and ended up getting weary from all the fighting. I went home and started repeat crafting a simple weapon for proficiencies and I got the notification again during that time, suggesting that it was tiring me out. It felt a bit odd to me that that was similar enough to fighting a horde of zombies to be called out.

Later, I started cooking up a bunch of food to better preserve what I had and had the notification again. How tiring is making some meat jerky?

I could be missing something as to how this works, but I can’t help but feel like it has an issue with it.

The warning isn’t about current exercise level, it is about your overall weariness. If you start working right after fighting a horde, well, obviously you won’t get much rest so your weariness won’t drop. It can also fluctuate sometimes between two levels and you’ll constantly get “you’re becoming weary/you’re feeling rested” messages. Maybe it was fixed in latest build, idk.
I agree that cooking not being a low-level exercise is wrong (in most cases).

Depends a lot on the type of cooking. Having been a cook it is both physically and mentally exausting to be cooking meal after meal for hours on end and most of my cataclysm cooking atleast tends to be batches and batches for days or weeks of meals. Doing all that I could definitely see as a workout. My home cooking though is like the laziest shit ever and should be no activity because I tend to just let things take their time and slowcook so I can see both views